Chapter 28: Drunken Dream Murder
Tang Weining's face was twisted in frustration, like a crumpled cat. "I've thought about it, but, but... the fire scene investigation turned up nothing."
Tu Lanxun stared at him, "Was your brother with you every minute of the whole process?"
Tang Weining nodded. "Well, I received a call from the school that night, and he also replied on his phone, but we never left each other's sight."
"What about before we went to the park?" Tu Lanxun asked, "Did Tang Pengan or Liang Wei go upstairs alone and enter Bai Xiaoju's room?"
Tang Weining held his head. "I don't know. I was washing dishes when the dishwasher broke down. It took over half an hour to fix it. Chaochao was the one accompanying the guests."
But Bai Chao was already dead. Tu Lanxun put that question aside for now and turned to ask about the details of the day Bai Chao was murdered. However, Tang Weining was injured, and after being tossed around by her and N several times today, he was exhausted and incoherent.
N handed her a thin sheet and frowned. "He's starting to talk nonsense. Just use this to see it."
Tu Lanxun took it. It was the same monocle he had used before. "Isn't this for seeing ghosts?"
"No, it's for seeing the truth. If a ghost is invisible, you can use it to see ghosts, but if it's a living person..." N suddenly sneered.
If a living person smears blood on a lens, others can look at him/her through the lens and see his/her memories, but the prerequisite is that he/she is fully aware of the situation and voluntarily contributes to smearing the blood on the lens.
Tang Weining nodded numbly, indicating his willingness to cooperate. He lifted his robe and actually tried to squeeze open the wounds on his chest and abdomen, but Tu Lanxun stopped him, "Cut your fingers! Cut your fingers!"
If she sends someone to the emergency room today, she won't be able to open the store anymore.
The monocle was painted red, and Xun placed the round lens in front of her eye. Since she was an Oriental, she could not directly clamp the lens at the angle between the brow bone and the nose bridge like Westerners did - her nose was high enough, but her brow bone was not enough.
The vision through her eyes was red. She stared at the red Tang Weining and said according to N's instructions: "Now, start recalling the day Bai Chao died."
The half-dried blood automatically flowed on the glasses, gathering and dispersing into a suspicious red mist. When the red mist dispersed again, Tu Lanxun felt dizzy and closed his other eye involuntarily. Tang Weining, who was sitting on the ground in a pajamas, had changed into a version of him wearing a shirt and trousers.
That was him three years ago.
Three years ago, Tang Weining was a little younger than he is now. He sat face to face with Tang Pengan. The table was full of empty beer cans. He looked as drunk as a cooked raw pickled shrimp, and his head nodded.
Tang Pengan lifted him up and moved him to the sofa. At the same time, Tang Weining held a pair of women's hands on his other arm. Bai Chao appeared, and the two of them worked together to move Tang Weining.
"Brother, brother, are you still awake?" Tang Pengan waved his hand, and Tang Weining replied vaguely, "Yeah...", but closed his eyes in an instant.
"Okay, brother, I'm leaving now."
The rest of the story did not exist in Tang Weining's memory, because the guy fell asleep and only intermittent sounds could be heard.
"Liang Wei, are you there yet...? Slow down..."
"Okay...sister-in-law...don't send me off..."
The door opened and closed, cans clashed in the plastic bag, someone's waist hit the corner of the table, Bai Chao cursed softly, the dishes were stacked up, and the dishwasher door slammed shut.
At this time, Tang Weining regained consciousness and muttered, "Don't, don't move... I'll sleep for a while and then go take a shower..."
Bai Chao was annoyed: "Take a break! What's the point of drinking and smoking all day? Hey, I know you're upset, but your daughter won't come back."
This sentence must have hit Tang Weining right in the heart. He felt guilty and uncomfortable, struggling to get angry, "Chao, your daughter is gone, are you particularly resentful... It's all my fault..."
Bai Chao remained silent and ignored him. Tang Weining's emotions became even more turbulent, but the alcohol and blood in his head took over, and he just opened his eyes a crack before closing them again. Bai Chao, who had been busy doing chores around the house, disappeared, leaving only the slightly resentful sound of ping-pong.
Darkness, endless darkness, but there was a vague "click" sound. Bai Chao said something, but no one answered. Only Tang Weining murmured softly and resentfully, squeezing the air in his mouth, unable to utter the resentment.
"I...it was me...I killed..."
"Chaochao, you heard wrong...haha...I didn't...how could it be..."
After sleeping for about seven or eight minutes, when Tang Weining opened his eyes again, the living room floor was covered with a disposable plastic round tablecloth, blood was slithering, and Bai Chao was lying in front of him. Tang Weining was wearing a shirt, trousers and dishwashing gloves, and he was swinging the kitchen knife at Bai Chao's neck again and again.
Tang Weining's movements were extremely smooth and he moved with a drunken ferocity. Bai Chao lay there with his eyes wide open, his face full of disbelief. Soon, his vision became blurred again, as if it had been blurred, leaving only the most basic changes in shape and shadow.
Tu Lanxun moved his monocle further away, but couldn't find the signal. N said, "Can't you see clearly? That means he really was blacking out. His deep memory doesn't retain that part."
Although it was intermittent, one could still feel the cruelty of that person's actions. The white strips became smaller and smaller like mitosis, and the red color spread to the corners of the field of vision, eventually covering the entire ground, like a sea of red flowers blooming in spring.
Just as the last two moves were about to begin, Tu Lanxun exclaimed in disbelief, "Why are there commercials inserted?"
The monocle started playing an advertisement, which was a CG video promoting a game to scam people out of their money. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
N's voice came from the side, but seemed far away: "It's just a game prop. That's it. You're not satisfied with it even though I gave it to you for free?"
After being forced to watch the 30-second commercial, Tu Lanxun hadn't caught Tang Weining's final move before the scene ended.
She vaguely remembered that the knife was thrown to the ground with a "clang" sound, and then Tang Weining turned and walked out of the picture, and her memory blurred into ripples again.
"Should I continue thinking about this?" Tang Weining accepted the fact that "she has a way to see my memories" faster than Tu Lanxun did. She replied, "That would be great."
Monocle sneakily inserted a 59-second advertisement, followed by Tang Weining's memories of the next day. Apparently, it was already early morning when he woke up again.
Looking down, his white shirt was soaked with dried blood. It didn't have the cheap, horror-movie feel of a prop; it formed a thick, reddish-brown crust, a startling sight. Tang Weining had apparently been sleeping on the sofa on the first floor. As he lowered his leg, he stepped on the imported chrome steel kitchen knife, the blade already slightly bent.
At his feet were corpses strewn all over the ground, their hair matted in blood, their heads and eyes staring in fear in the direction where Tang Weining was sleeping.
He was startled and sat back on the sofa, gasping for air and screaming, covering his face with his hands. He saw that his five fingers were stuck with blood and entangled with several long hairs. Tang Weining tore at them and let out his first scream of the morning.
#
"You know what happened next. I didn't report the crime to the police. Instead, I hid the body."
After N assured that the monocle would see the true memory of the human brain, Tu Lanxun untied the tie covering Tang Weining's eyes, and the latter said dully.
"The next day was Sunday. I cleaned up the scene at home and pretended that Chaochao and I hadn't been out all day. That night, I went to school and activities as usual. I drove a car from our home garage, where there were no surveillance cameras."
"So traffic and municipal surveillance along the way showed that the car drove from my home to the school gate, dropped me off and drove away. The car was finally driven back to my garage. The driver was a woman wearing a mask, who was believed to be Bai Chao."
"Since Sunday night, I've been staying at school and not going home. From Monday on, I started calling Chaochao's number, but it was turned off. I turned it off myself. I also texted her studio, leaving all sorts of traces."
"On Tuesday afternoon, I took leave to report her missing. The police entered the villa with me, and they immediately suspected me. However, there were no signs of foul play in the house, and according to surveillance evidence, my movements did not overlap with Bai Chao's. On Sunday, when I entered the school and never came out again, she drove home alive."
Tu Lanxun sighed: "The one who helped you solve this problem was Tang Pengan."
Tang Pengan received a call from Tang Weining on Sunday. It took a long time to convince Tang Pengan, so the final result was that Tang Weining disguised himself as Bai Chao and drove away from home. He picked up Tang Pengan at a place without surveillance on the way, and the two of them staged a fake exchange of yin and yang.
Tang Weining was still feeling guilty, but Tang Pengan introduced him to a master, saying that Liang Wei had had her fortune told there and it was very accurate, and that they needed to get rid of the bad luck of this matter.
There are two possibilities.
——Tang Weining was used by the master to kill someone. Afterwards, the master disappeared and used the relationship between Liang Wei and Tang Pengan to sneak back to Tang Weining.
——There was no story about the master in the first half. The "self" who killed people in Tang Weining's memory was actually his younger brother Tang Pengan.
The first one might pick out Tang Pengan, the second one might pick out Liang Wei, but it is also possible that the couple will join forces.
Tu Lanxun said, "Didn't you notice that your memories were sometimes first-person and sometimes third-person? The entire murder scene was from the third-person perspective."
Tang Weining said bitterly: "I thought it was drunkenness that caused memory distortion, and I had serious psychological problems at that time, so I didn't think much about the perspective being withdrawn."
So no matter which one, Tang Weining, a highly educated intellectual in his late twenties, was a complete naiveté, his entire family sold out and he was left counting money for others. Not only did he clean up the mess committed by others, he also lived in constant fear for it for three years.
N sneered: "We came a little early. If we were any later, he would probably be gone too. The three of us can take care of everything. It would save us so much trouble."
Tu Lanxun said, "Lift up your nightgown and let me see it."
Tang Weining and the invisible N both turned to look at her, speechless with shock. A little embarrassed, she explained, "When you touched me just now, it felt like there was something on my thigh."
Tang Weining glanced at Tu Lanxun several times. She was about the same age as his student, but he had to swallow his pride and lift the hem of his robe in front of Tu Lanxun. Tu Lanxun moved closer, and in an instant, his face turned pale.
There were several finger marks on the outside of his thigh, which were purple-blue in color, and even the "ji" and "dou" of the fingertips could be vaguely seen.
That angle is definitely something I can't achieve by myself.
Moreover, finger marks generally do not have fingerprints, nor do they completely match the contours of the fingertips. The marks are more like frostbite than pinch marks.
N became happy: "Yeah, it's a ghost."
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